Household Gods

“That’s a nice song, Mistress,” Julia whispered as they tiptoed out of the children’s room. “Has it got words?”

“If it does, I don’t know them,” Nicole answered, with a small stab of guilt at the lie – or maybe it was her gut clenching again. “I’m going to go back to sleep now myself, or try. If I do, you’ll be on your own for a while in the morning. I hope you can – “

“I understand,” Julia said. “I’ve managed before. Rest if you can, Mistress.”

Lumpy mattress. Scratchy blanket. Leftover stink from the dregs in the pot. Nicole didn’t care. Her belly wasn’t churning so hard. Next to that, nothing else counted. She yawned, stretched, wiggled… slept.

When Nicole woke up, daylight was streaming in through the window. She still didn’t feel good, not even close, but, after she used the chamberpot a little less explosively than she had in the nighttime, the buffaloes decided to end their stampede through her insides and head off somewhere to graze.

There was nowhere to dump the chamberpot except out the window. “Sewers,” she muttered. “This town needs sewers.” She gritted her teeth and dumped the pot as Julia had the night before.

She dressed quickly in a fresh loincloth and tunic, and looked at herself in the mirror in the makeup kit. She looked like a chimney sweep. Most of the smoke that hadn’t gone through the hole in the roof the day before had clung to her.

She washed her face with water from the terra sigillata pitcher, careful now not to get any water in her mouth, the way she would have been in a shower south of the border.

The water was bad, no arguing with that – or with the reek that lingered around the emptied chamberpot. So what was she supposed to drink? Wine? She could water it, she supposed – wouldn’t the alcohol kill germs as easily as it slaughtered brain cells? She’d get a lower dose then, too. Maybe she could work out a formula as to how little wine she could get away with before the water went toxic.

She still didn’t like it. She liked even less that the kids had to drink the stuff in any proportion. Maybe she could talk them into drinking milk after all, and never mind the Marcomanni and the Quadi, whoever they were.

She studied her newly washed face in the mirror. Not a chimney sweep, not anymore. Now she just looked like hell. “That,” she said to nobody in particular, “is why God made makeup.”

Women here, she’d observed, powdered and painted themselves as heavily as a geisha in full regalia – and into much the same dead-white mask. The makeup Umma had used was less finely ground than the pricey Clinique that Nicole had held onto even when money got tight, as her one by-God extravagance. Its texture and color made her think, rather disjointedly, of quite another white powder, one that had been distressingly common in L.A. Rome might lack flush toilets and bathroom tissue – but it was also blessedly free of cocaine.

It was free of powderpuff and makeup brushes, too. She smoothed the powder on as best she could with a bit of rag – no cotton balls, either. Who’d have thought there’d be a world without cotton balls? Or swabs? Or -

Or eyebrow pencils, or lipsticks. Her finger had to do for both, and the rag growing grubbier with each step in the ritual. No cold cream, either, to remove mistakes or clean her fingers. If she could figure out how all those things were made, she’d be willing to bet there’d be a market for them.

It was enough, for the time being, that she’d armored her face against the world. She’d understated the effect – probably people would think she was trying for a little too much of the natural look – but she still looked, to her own eyes, clownish and overdone. “Tammy Faye Does Carnuntum,” she said to her reflection. A smile, she noticed, cracked the paint just a little. No wonder geishas never seemed to wear an expression, just the blank white mask.

It did what it was supposed to do, at least. It kept the world from guessing how lousy she felt.

“Cash box,” she reminded herself, and scooped up that and the key before she headed out the door. She didn’t go straight downstairs, but paused at the curtain to the children’s room. No sound came from inside. She peered in. Enough of the early light seeped through their shuttered window to show them both still sleeping. Their faces were quiet, neither flushed nor pale. Aurelia had taken all the covers, but Lucius didn’t seem to mind. He slept on his stomach with his black hair all in a tousle. He looked nothing at all like either of Nicole’s in the way he slept, but the soft baby-cheeks, the nub of nose, caught at her throat.

That was why children looked the way they did, wasn’t it? So their mothers wouldn’t throw them out before they could walk. Not just their mothers, either. Whoever found herself in charge of them.